IPCC Invites In the Activists

When Greenpeace personnel are participating, a political process is underway – not a scientific one.

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It’s official. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is cognitively impaired. It is wholly incapable of learning from its mistakes.

The IPCC is comprised of three working groups. Working Group 3 is led by Ottmar Edenhofer, an economist at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Three days ago that institute posted an announcement on its website calling for “expert reviewers” to provide feedback to Working Group 3’s draft report. The first paragraph of that announcement includes the following:

The scientists who are organizing this process ask for voluntary contributions from experts across all sectors, from scholars to business people or NGO representatives. [bold added]

Here we go again. The World Wildlife Fund is an NGO. Greenpeace is an NGO. The people who work for those organizations are not scientific experts. They are advocates, activists, and partisans. They have an agenda. They are paid a salary to advance that agenda.

The public is repeatedly assured that the IPCC is an objective and rigorous scientific body, composed of the world’s top scientists. The public is told it can trust IPCC reports because thousands of “scientific expert reviewers” participate in the IPCC process.

official IPCC graphic, related to its 2007 climate report

But there’s the IPCC’s fiction and then there are the facts. The IPCC has a very long, very sordid history of recruiting personnel linked to activist organizations. See, for example:

In January, I made public the contents of three internal IPCC data sticks leaked by a whistle blower. The documents on those sticks relate to Working Group 2. When I examined the comments submitted by the “expert reviewers” regarding Working Group 2’s draft report, I found activists posing as experts.

Rather than limiting their comments to narrow scientific concerns, these activists were distorting and abusing the review process. To them, it was nothing less than a behind-the-scenes lobbying opportunity. As I wrote then:

Many of their suggestions amount to bald-faced attempts to embed activist source material – and activist perspectives – in a scientific document.

A mere eight weeks later, the IPCC has flung the doors wide, rolled out the red-carpet, and once again invited in the activists.